I’m starting to get a bit fucking wound up recently, mostly by royal mail and their “I’m not going to bother putting a card through your door, so you let the item sit in the depot for a week and get sent into limbo for the next 6 weeks being returned to sender”, that’s another story however.

What I’m starting to get fucking annoyed with is how other people’s fuck up seems to translate directly back to the buyers problem from various places online.

Play.com fucked me off, I ordered a game early December, Borderlands. It was listed for 17.99 on their site, I logged in, ordered it and forgot about it. I only twigged at the end of Jan when I logged in that the order had never been sent out, just sat on “awaiting stock”. Awaiting stock? Their site showed the game back in stock without an issue, back on sale for 44.99. So er, if you’ve got the stock, send my fucking order out cunts?

Seeing as it had been nearly 2 months and the order was never looking like it was going to get fulfilled I wrote to them. Sorry, they said, the item was on a promotional basis of a “today only” offer and had limited stock. Wahaay, excuse number 1 and it’s a cracker. Nowhere on the site did it let me know that the item was a day only promotional offer, nowhere did it mention stock was limited and absolutely nowhere at all did it let me know that even though the order had been sucessfully placed, I’d have to second guess their stock system and contact them directly 2 months later after they’ve ignored and failed to honour the order.

Apparently though, legally, I have no leg to stand on! The sellers are utterly protected via whatever bullshit excuses they want to make up with the simple fact that “until they dispatch the goods no contract is entered into” for the sale. So the advertising of the goods, the selling them to me for that price, the agreement of trading on that price, the taking of my money and then not honouring a promised order apparently means absofuckinglutely JACK SHIT in terms of legality. There is nothing at all to protect me, they make up any excuse they want, I get fucked. Nice.

So recently I order a box set online from ebay. This is slightly different, this item REQUIRED me to pay isntantly after ordering it for a buy it now transaction. I was warned that by clicking the link of saying yes I was legally bound to pay for said item and I had bought it. Seems that doesn’t apply to the sellers though. Another email through this morning “We’re sorry, your payment has been refunded this item has been withdrawn from our listings”.

Erm… is that why it’s now back on sale in your ebay shop for 20 quid more? Nothing about listing it for the wrong price, nothing about sending it out to me anyway because they fucked up the price listing, they just took my money, entered into an apparently legal binding contract, then just decided to lie to me and break it. Apparently that’s completely fine in the world of business, accepting an order, taking someone’s money, agreeing on a transaction, directly lying to them about the item being “withdrawn” then placing it back on sale again for an inflated price.

It’s not as if I was in any position to think the 25 quid I pay for the box set was a mistake or incorrectly advertised, there were loads of box sets around that price online, 22.99 was the best, but it was apparently unsealed. I picked the box set that was new, sealed and the lowest price. They’ve completely fucked me over.

Can’t help but feel there should be a little bit more in the way of protecting someone who has already handed over their money only to get fucked by a trader who just decides they can’t be bothered to honour an apparently legally binding agreement. Ebay policy:

Policy overview

When an item receives a bid on eBay, that bid is a legally binding contract between the seller and the bidder. Buyers should be able to be confident that the item they bid on will not change or become unavailable during the auction process. Therefore, as a seller you are not allowed to list items if you do not intend to honour the listing agreement, if you cannot deliver to the winner/buyer, or if you intend to change the item during the auction process (adding to auctions is permitted - changing the actual item for sale is not allowed).

So er… where is my item plzzzzzzzzzzzzzz